Leaving Church

The Long Walk Out the Door

I walked out of the door of church for the final time in January of 2020. 

It was a long, slow march to the door. I had stopped attending Sunday services the previous Summer and was only participating in my progressivish small group dedicated to helping people heal from their past trauma.  

There were a thousand redirections that got me to the place where I was brave enough to cleave myself from the church I grew up in. A million tearing downs and rebuildings that took place to empower me to leave. So to say there was a turning point is inaccurate. Rather there was a slow and steady turning of the rudder that finally redirected me 180 degrees after a long, long time.

But… if I were to identify a moment when things began changing form, it was the morning of Good Friday in 2019 when I published a blog on the women’s ministry social media written by a woman who held a lot of sway over the ministry. It was titled “Why is Good Friday So Good?” and it was everything you would expect from a non-denominational (read Baptist) mega-church in the Bible Belt. 

Essentially, Good Friday is so good because Jesus saved us from our dirty sins, which were bullet pointed and alphabetical, beginning with abortion and ending with worldly theology. I am not joking. 

I had long since gotten rid of this caliber of evangelicalism. To me, sin was different from its classical definition. Sin was a misstep. Us acting in ways that don't reflect the person we want to be, a violation of our innate human goodness. Sin did not send you to a literal fiery hell, it just made things hellish on earth for us, who long to be whole. 

It was naive of me to think it was safe to solicit help from a fellow leader on the social media page. And so upon receiving and editing the purest manifestation of evangelicalism, I realized that the spark in this whole thing was gone. To my chagrin, I didn’t believe a single word of what I was about to post, yet I posted it anyway so as not to make unnecessary waves. 

And then the sickening reality set in that I was unwittingly participating in this *waves hand over Christians.* 

In spite of calling it, “working against the machine from within the machine,” I realized I wasn’t. I was a cog in the machine. I was quiet when I had to be, a good little christian soldier, hating, but settling into her rank and file. All the while harboring the resentment to match all the self-suppression and boundary violation. 

I began to notice that I had said enough to the right people to make it onto the watch list, and that there would always be a glass ceiling for me. As there should be I guess, because I was on my way to a worldview that stands in stark contrast to theirs. In their business, the acquiring and saving of souls, anything that thwarts that effort needs strict regulation. Especially if thwarting it, meant blowing up salvation from literal eternal damnation as a valid life’s purpose. Me being there and being any semblance of vocal, without following their script, was counterproductive and needed quashing.

This isn’t church’s problem. They are exactly what they claim to be. They’ve been saving souls since Augustine came up with the idea all those years ago. It was me, hoping I could change things. Saving church from itself by sacrificing myself on the altar of idealism. Playing the hero… nay, the martyr, to an institution that no longer had any use or love for me was my problem. 

But the path holds true. If we walk it, stay open to what it brings to teach us, it will show us the problem, and then the fix. 

The longer I participated in church, true to the path and curious, the more I saw the futility of my life’s purpose. The more I saw that the church to which I belonged seemed to be a massive ego projection of a lot of human egos over the course of a long time. A history worth of time. Humans have always relished having a group to belong to, and we have always loved being able to say who is in and out of those groups. And the evangelical church is no exception. Their members cling to that group identity like it’s saving their lives, because the church has convinced them it is. 

This is not a criticism. Group identity is a really important part of development. We can’t get beyond it, without it. So I’m not mad at church for having this set up. Many things do, I just wish they could do it without all the trauma added on top. 

And of course there are systemic benefits for white men and their white wives that keep the group mentality (and all that lovely trauma) going. A lot of power for a few people keeping the ball rolling in that same violent, oppressive direction as always, with such slow slow progress to the contrary.

Once this had settled, and my progressivish small group became untenable as well, the only thing keeping me there was fear of the unknown, the betrayal of my parents and grandparents who raised me to be Christian, my ego tendency to martyr myself over and over and over for people and places who prove themselves incapable of reciprocity and therefore unworthy of it.

Eventually, the path handed me the key to fixing these problems as well. And staying true to it, I walked right out the door scared to death, but trusting it to deliver me where I am meant to go.